This page exists because honest reviews need a "do not buy" section - even when the product is free. If your office matches these profiles, switching to ONLYOFFICE will cost you more than it saves.
ONLYOFFICE is excellent for most offices - this entire set says so. But "most" is doing real work in that sentence. Some offices are wired into Microsoft Office so deeply that the licence fee is the cheapest part of their setup, and ripping it out breaks machinery worth far more. This page names those offices precisely, so the right people stay, the right people switch, and nobody learns the difference during a deadline.
The pattern is machinery, not documents. Offices run on documents can switch; offices run on Excel machinery cannot.
If buttons inside workbooks prepare your reports, reconcile your stock or generate your invoices, your office does not use Excel - it runs software written in Excel. ONLYOFFICE cannot execute a single line of that software, because its macros are JavaScript and VBA simply does not run. Rewriting an estate of macros is a development project with testing and risk, priced in weeks. Against that, the Microsoft licence is a rounding error. Stay, and revisit only if the macros themselves are ever rebuilt.
Finance and analysis staff living in Power Query, Power Pivot, data models, dynamic arrays and the newest Excel functions are buying a moving frontier with their subscription. Alternative suites implement the established core of Excel well and the frontier late or never. A model that refreshes from three sources and feeds a dashboard is not "a spreadsheet" - it is infrastructure. The honest test: if your Excel user describes their workbook as "the system," that desk keeps Microsoft Office.
Indian accounting workflows lean on Excel bridges: add-ins and export tools that pull from accounting software, banking utilities, and return-filing helpers built specifically for Microsoft Excel's COM add-in architecture. ONLYOFFICE has plugins, but they are a different system - your existing add-ins do not load, and the vendors of those tools support Excel, full stop. Until your accounting toolchain itself certifies another suite, the accounts desk is a Microsoft Office desk, whatever the rest of the office does.
Some organisations are not buying Word and Excel; they are buying the weave - documents that live in SharePoint, approvals in Teams, mail in Outlook, meetings that spawn files that file themselves. ONLYOFFICE replaces the editing surface of that world honourably, but not the weave. If your processes genuinely run through Microsoft 365 services end to end, a documents-only swap saves little and strands much. Assess the workflow, not the apps, before touching anything.
A quiet trap: the small Access database somebody built in 2016 that now runs dispatch, or the Publisher leaflet template marketing still uses. ONLYOFFICE has no Access or Publisher equivalents at all. These tools hide in offices for years and surface only when the suite is already uninstalled. The migration audit in this set exists largely to find them - search for .accdb files and ask about them by name before deciding anything.
Almost no office is 100 percent in either camp, which is why the money-saving answer is usually a hybrid: ONLYOFFICE free on every desk doing documents, and Microsoft Office kept only where the machinery lives - the accounts PC, the analyst's desk, the macro machine. Twenty desks might need two licences instead of twenty. That is not a failed migration; it is the correct one, and it is how the offices that save real money actually do it.
The video shows what ONLYOFFICE does brilliantly - this page marks the border where brilliance ends and machinery begins.
Watch Full VideoYes - that is exactly the hybrid pattern. Keep Microsoft Office on the accounts desk where the add-ins live, and run free ONLYOFFICE everywhere else. Most offices find only one or two desks genuinely need the paid suite.
Not a honest one inside ONLYOFFICE - Power Query and Power Pivot are Microsoft technologies with no equivalent there. Keep those models on Excel. Staff can still use ONLYOFFICE for the ordinary documents around the reporting work.
Audit before you decide: search shared drives for .xlsm, .xlsb and .accdb files, and ask each department which Excel buttons and tools they would miss on Monday morning. The answers take an hour to collect and prevent every nasty surprise.